[PATCH RFC] ima: Fallback to a ctime guard without i_version updates

[Mimi Zohar]

On Mon, 2025-12-29 at 11:52 -0600, Frederick Lawler wrote:
> Since commit 1cf7e834a6fb ("xfs: switch to multigrain timestamps"), IMA
> is no longer able to correctly track inode.i_version due to the struct
> kstat.change_cookie no longer containing an updated i_version.
> 
> Introduce a fallback mechanism for IMA that instead tracks a
> integrity_ctime_guard() in absence of or outdated i_version
> for stacked file systems.

Thanks, Frederick.

Instead of using the new function name integrity_ctime_guard() to describe the
change, please describe the change in words.  Perhaps something like: rely on
the inode's ctime to detect a file data or metadata change.

The purpose of generating a ctime guard value, as opposed to using the tv_sec
and tv_nsec, I assume is to minimize the amount of memory being saved in the
iint.

> 
> EVM is left alone since it mostly cares about the backing inode.
> 
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/aTspr4_h9IU4EyrR@CMGLRV3
> Fixes: 1cf7e834a6fb ("xfs: switch to multigrain timestamps")
> Suggested-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton at kernel.org>
> Signed-off-by: Frederick Lawler <fred at cloudflare.com>
> ---
> The motivation behind this was that file systems that use the
> cookie to set the i_version for stacked file systems may still do so.
> Then add in the ctime_guard as a fallback if there's a detected change.
> The assumption is that the ctime will be different if the i_version is
> different anyway for non-stacked file systems.

Agreed. This patch inverts the i_version test to return immediately if the
i_version hasn't changed and then checks the ctime guard value.  Is the ctime
guard value test simply a performance improvement?

> 
> I'm not too pleased with passing in struct file* to
> integrity_inode_attrs_changed() since EVM doesn't currently use
> that for now, but I couldn't come up with another idea to get the
> stat without coming up with a new stat function to accommodate just
> the file path, fully separate out IMA/EVM checks, or lastly add stacked
> file system support to EVM (which doesn't make much sense to me
> at the moment).
> 
> I plan on adding in self test infrastructure for the v1, but I would
> like to get some early feedback on the approach first.

I really appreciate your adding a self test.

thanks,

Mimi